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Sow & Tailor is proud to current The Efficiency of Sure Gestures, a solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Molly Bounds on view by July 1, 2023. Molly Bounds’s work usually illustrates the likeness of indecision by psychological portraiture, surfacing as contemplative stills and their fragments of need – profoundly assembly or surpassing all identified limits. In Bounds’s newest work, figures are newly engaged in play. Impressed by the apply and efficiency of the Los Angeles clown group, performers and their friends have offered no route however additional exploration towards residing a life much less clouded with hesitation, releasing the thoughts from the purgatory of choice paralysis, and studying to rely once more on impulse and instinct.
Her work current us with figures in suspended motion and heightened presence, wholly dedicated to the duty at hand, regardless of how fruitless. The artist depicts moments which are intimate, mundane, and humanizing. Within the portray Finale a performer stands in entrance of stage curtains; all that’s seen is their palms, which delicately and triumphantly elevate a hat. The easy gesture of eradicating one’s hat turns into a drawn out and suspenseful efficiency. Bounds shares with us an intriguing facet of clowning apply – an exaggerated and amplified state of experiencing the world. A protracted-awaited climax assigns nice energy to one thing miniscule. As performers, clowns set off a complete vary of feelings of their spectators: concern, pleasure, and empathy by their return to a primal state of being outlined by combat or flight, vulnerability, and inevitably failure.
In 2022, Bounds participated within the John Michael Kohler Arts Heart’s Arts & Trade residency, the place she was thrown into the world of metalworking. A real baptism by hearth, the residency pushed the printmaker right into a apply she describes as an “endurance take a look at of the physique.” Bounds additionally echoed the ethos of the Heart and the late arts philanthropist Ruth Kohler (1941-2020), who was dedicated to breaking down the hierarchies of high-quality artwork and championing self-taught artists. Like Kohler, Bounds’s apply highlights individuals on the margins; of their mythology, clowns have traditionally been introduced as a part of the decrease rungs of society, with their title even used as an amusing insult. From this era in Bounds’s trajectory emerged a number of small-scale brass sculptures depicting clown paraphernalia, also called “failure trophies” or “arbitrary compasses.” These talismans embrace a brass nostril with a skinny pink string connected. Objects like this grant the performer permission to look, step into themselves additional, embrace flaws, habituate danger, and fail gloriously.
The Efficiency of Sure Gestures brings us into the unapologetic world of a group on the fringes, the place freedom just isn’t imagined, fairly it’s lived. —Tina Barouti & Molly Bounds
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